high school experience essay examples

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The La Salle Falconer

The high school experience: a personal reflection.

Filled with growth and life lessons, the high school experience has been a journey worth the climb.

Anna Waldron , Editor May 4, 2022

High school is arguably the most transformative time of a person’s life. My own experience has been filled with more memories, laughter, stress, and — most importantly, growth — than I ever could have anticipated when I began. 

The lessons I have learned about myself, about others, and about the world in the last four years have shaped who I am today, and that person is far from the naive 14-year-old girl who walked through those glass doors of La Salle nearly four years ago. I was oblivious to the overwhelming emotional distress that I would feel when I started high school. 

In some ways, it feels like an everyday battle. 

As a freshman, the struggle began with adjusting to what felt like a whole new world. I was desperately trying to make friends, considering I had only one. I never knew what it was like to feel alone in a school with so many people. I felt like I had to act a certain way or be a certain person in order to maintain a basic conversation with people in my classes or on my soccer team. 

Every day, my head was filled with an overwhelming concern about how I could manage to make myself look like someone with more friends than I actually had at the time. 

I remember constantly thinking, “I’ll start enjoying this at some point, right?” 

The truth is, I did. 

To anyone who is feeling the way I once felt, please know that those feelings do go away. By the end of my freshman year and into the next, I enjoyed myself. School wasn’t particularly challenging, and I was spending my weekends having fun with my friends and going to basketball games and sleepovers. I had finally created a routine and felt mostly content with my life, aside from daunting thoughts in my head telling me it was all a lie.

I think that’s something that all teenagers deal with. It comes with the age, the questions, “do my friends actually like me?” or “am I enough?” — “do people worry about me or have I tricked myself into thinking they do?” 

I continued to move throughout my sophomore year feeling a new level of comfort with my life. Then, the pandemic hit. 

The original two weeks of quarantine turned into two months, and then two years. The predictable high school experience I had become accustomed to was no longer my reality, and instead, high school turned into an atypical rollercoaster of isolation from all the essential parts of the experience. 

To say it was hard would be an understatement, but after the initial forced adjustment to a remote life, I was forced to be content without relying on others.

Without having to fear other people’s judgments of me or having to conceal myself in social situations to appear more “acceptable,” I gained independence and confidence within myself that I didn’t know existed.

Then finally — after over a year — the long-awaited return to school arrived. 

I rejoiced in my ability to thrive academically again and I was so relieved to feel like I was really learning. I reconnected with my friends, ate lunch outside, took finals, and then — after a blur of two months — the year ended. My junior year flew by like no other. 

When senior year rolled around, I felt out of place. I couldn’t imagine a world where I belonged to the oldest class at the school. In the beginning, it was odd getting used to, but after a few weeks, it was nothing but a thrill as I planned what the next weekend alongside my friends would hold. 

My friendships were flourishing and I was becoming closer and closer with people I had never really gotten to know. 

Unlike the three years prior, my senior year has felt like a stereotypical high school experience, and I could not be more grateful for it. 

I always thought of myself as someone who was above enjoying things like attending soccer games, getting ready for homecoming with my friends, singing karaoke in someone’s basement, or going to a trampoline park for an 18-year-old’s birthday party. 

The truth is, I’m not. 

I regret that I spent so long depriving myself of the things I love in order to fit a narrative that I created for myself. 

I love that I will graduate high school happier and more fulfilled than I ever felt during my other three years here. It feels like everything has finally come full circle, after all these years of feeling so alone. 

So yes, it was transformative. I am finally content with the person I have become and the life I have chosen to lead. I wouldn’t be the same without La Salle and I wouldn’t be the same without the people I’ve gotten to know here. 

I know that I will look back on my high school experience here, not feeling critical of the insecurities I have felt, but feeling grateful for the memories and lessons that came regardless of them. 

Senior Anna Waldron has lived in Portland, Oregon her whole life, in the same neighborhood as nine members of her extended family.  Outside of The...

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Personal High School Experience Reflective Essay

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Education plays an important role in every individual’s life and the whole nation’s destiny. For this reason, the emphasis should be put on the content of the national education programs, having a significant impact on the consciousness of the growing generation.

However, there is much space for improvement in contemporary education systems inducing students to do the monotonous primitive assignments. Descriptions of the American School System by Michael Moore in Idiot Nation and John Gatto in Against School are similar to my own high school experience full of boredom and dissatisfaction.

Description of school lessons in Gatto’s Against School is close to my own perception of the teaching-learning process but helps to view the problem from a new perspective. Teachers and students as the main participants of the teaching-learning process are inclined to shift the responsibility for the low effectiveness of the programs on each other.

On one hand, learners blame their tutors in lack of knowledge and inability to generate their interest. Most young people consider their teachers to be the party responsible for their low academic achievements. My own high school lessons did not become a memorable experience for me. I remember the monotonous routine of doing the same senseless assignments day by day.

It was really hard for me and my classmates to come to realization of the usefulness of learning the enormous amounts of theoretical materials and sitting around, wasting our time. It seemed that our program was separated from the rest of life and there was hardly any link between the class discussion and the reality outside the classroom. Our tutors explained that the education programs were not aimed at entertaining learners. The high school lessons were compared to taking medicines, being unpleasant but useful.

We wondered why it was impossible to combine the business with pleasure and make the lessons more exciting and closer to reality. Receiving the grades remained the primary motivation for learning the materials and developing skills for me and other learners. On the other hand, suffering from the ineffectiveness of the education programs, teachers are bored at the lessons as well but they shift the responsibility on their students.

“Boredom is the common condition of schoolteachers, and anyone who has spent time in a teachers’ lounge can vouch for the low energy, the whining, the dispirited attitudes, to be found there” (Gatto XIII). John Gatto’s description of education process is rather realistic, viewing the issue from the teachers’ perspective and providing the educators’ opinion of the problem.

Gatto shed light on the endless circle of the teachers’ and students’ attitudes towards the education programs. I agree with the author that concentrating on the searches of the responsible party, the participants of the teaching-learning process do not look for the ways to enhance its effectiveness.

I completely agree with Moore who puts emphasis on the content of contemporary education programs as the key factor for increasing their effectiveness. Actually, the idea of combining the business with pleasure in lessons occurred to me when I was a high school student. Saying that the whole high school course was boring and senseless would mean to distort the reality.

In fact, I remember several lessons that were really exciting. Analyzing those activities, I must admit that I and my classmates were impressed when our teachers provided us with an opportunity to fill the gap between theory and practice and implement our knowledge in real life. The fact is that human memory has got certain laws and functions in accordance with them.

It can retain plenty of information that appears to be interesting for a learner. Moore uses an example of sports events popular among all categories of population and offers implementing the same principle in education programs. “Our challenge, Chomsky said, was to find a way to make politics as gripping and engaging as sports” (Moore 38).

Though the question whether it is possible to make the teaching-learning process exciting remains rather controversial, the attempts to generate the learners’ interest in their academic activities are praiseworthy. Striking the right balance between the form and the content of education programs, teachers could enhance their effectiveness significantly. Certainly, literacy is impossible without learning all the necessary theoretical materials.

Still, educators could obey the laws of human memory instead of struggling against them. Thus, altering diverse activities during the lesson and allowing the students to realize their creative potential, educators could enhance the popularity and effectiveness of their lessons significantly.

At the same time, instead of complaining of the lack of students’ interest, teachers could find the ways for generating it. For example, the majority of contemporary students are keen on computer games and other multimedia devices. This could become a blessing in disguise for developers of school programs.

Incorporating the elements of innovative techniques into the teaching process, teachers could take advantages of them instead of discussing their dramatic impact on the learners’ academic achievements and intellectual development. Describing the contemporary state of American education, Moore is rather realistic, and following his advice as to changing the approach to the content of education programs could be helpful for increasing their effectiveness and curing the education system in general.

Defining the primary goal of contemporary education is important for changing the approach to the content of the programs. From my personal high school experience I remember that developing the main academic skills was the primary goal of my teachers. And we felt as trained animals performing at the concerts. We were so bored with monotonous academic activities that could not rate their usefulness at it true value.

The goal of education is much broader than developing the basic learning skills. Education programs without exciting assignments aimed at generating the learners’ interest are similar to body without a soul. The scheme is right, but lacking a significant element, it does not work. “The Dilemma Training vs Education may be introduced […] on a more fundamental level, as an intelligence vs. intellect dilemma” (Krasko 63).

This issue becomes especially topical due to the present day progress of scientific knowledge. The education programs are unable to provide the learners with all the necessary information for the rest of their life. As opposed to descriptions of the school realities by Gatto and Moore and my personal high school experience, present day researchers shift the emphasis on the content of education programs.

Describing the American School System, Michael Moore in his Idiot Nation and John Gatto in his Against School raise the most burning issues of contemporary school, trying to get to the roots of the problems and offer the solutions. Being realistic, these descriptions resemble my own high school experience, enabling me to view the situation from a new perspective.

Works Cited

Gatto, John. Prologue. Against School . By Gatto. Canada: New Society Publishers, 2009. Print.

Krasko, Genrich. This Unbearable Boredom of Being: A Crisis of Meaning in America . Lincoln: iUniverse Inc., 2004. Print.

Moore, Michael. Idiot Nation . New York: Penguin, 2005. Print.

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IvyPanda. (2018, July 18). Personal High School Experience. https://ivypanda.com/essays/personal-high-school-experience/

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Looking Back on My High School Experience: The Best I've Ever Had

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Published: Apr 5, 2023

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